When I was looking for my first investment-management job, one of the popular interview questions at the time was “Where would you invest your grandmother’s money?” This was a way to weed out those that had no idea what they were doing. Anyone...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) provide a great way for individual investors to build completely diversified portfolios using only a handful of positions. The power of ETFs comes from the fact that these instruments combine the best of the stock and mutual fund worlds. Like stocks, ETFs have a ticker and can be bought on sold in real-time on any discount brokerage platform. Like mutual funds, ETFs are diversified funds that may own hundreds of stocks or bonds. It is common for ETFs to track the performance of a broad index like the S&P 500, a measure of the US market.

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As the US stock market roars to new all-time highs, a common question I hear today is "What do if I am still on the sidelines?"

Many people I talk to know that the stock market is one of the few games in town where they can meaningfully grow their wealth over time, but they are reluctant today to buy into a market that has run up so much...

One of the great tragedies of the financial world is that while the stock market has returned an average of 10% a year over the past century, the average investor has struggled to even keep pace with inflation. If you aren’t feeling as rich as...

The actively-managed mutual fund industry makes billions of dollars in management fees every year, but habitually fails, on average, to add much of any value to underlying investors. Here is how and why.

The somewhat short-lived Occupy Wall Street movement sought to split the world into two camps: the 99%, and the 1%. Wall Streeters were generally lumped into the latter category, and this was not intended as a compliment.

When most people talk about investing, they are talking about the stock market, and specifically about individual common stocks within the stock market. The news is dominated by coverage of the Apple's, Google's and Starbucks' of the world.

But it turns out that what what is arguably several times more important than what stocks you own in your portfolio is how much of your portfolio is in stocks and how much of it is in bonds, commodities, real estate, cash or something else.

This article will look at this question by introducing the field of asset allocation, talking about what it is and why it important.